The university was one of several sites throughout the nation to host the conference, said Tesla Jeltema, a physics professor at UCSC and a conference co-organizer.

Attendees needed to apply for the conference and were winnowed down from a larger pool, she said.

“These are women who are already interested in physics,” she said. “Here, we’ve also tried to attract students from community colleges.”

In the 10 years since the first conference at the University of Southern California, the attendance has grown from 29 to 1,200. Still, the field has a long way to go, with women making up roughly 20 percent of physicists nationwide.

“Sitting in a room with 250 other women all excited about physics makes you feel that a community is there,” she said.

Much of the weekend was focused not on explaining physics but expanding on what the women can do in physics beyond teaching. Among the workshops hosted Saturday and Sunday were panels with speakers from Silicon Valley who took physics and made it into a job.

Anna Henderson, a 21-year-old senior at Scripps College in Claremont, said the conference changed her perspective of what kind of career she might have. Henderson attended the 2013 conference and listened to an astronomer talk about how she carved a career with her values.

“She talked about the ways her personal values had shaped how she wrote grants, jobs she would take and how she still managed to have a science career while holding her ethical foundations,” she said. “Which, for me, was why I didn’t want to go into physics in high school. Because I felt like I would have to go into the defense industry and I was not interested in that.”

Henderson’s friend, Jessica Ng, also a Scripps College senior, attended the same conference years ago and said her experience pushed her to major in physics. The duo came to the 2015 conference to get a sense of what’s next.

“Now that we’re both seniors about to graduate in a couple of months, it seemed like a good time to do that and refresh ourselves about what’s out there,” Ng said.

Then there were others, such as 25-year-old Sarah Nickel from Portland State, in attendance at the conference for the first time.

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Many campuses don’t have outreach for women in STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — so the resources at the conference are invaluable. More than that, the event creates a sense of community.

“One of my roommates who I’m sharing a room with, she was like what bizarre world am I in that everywhere I look, I’m seeing women physicists,” Nickel said with a laugh.